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In the late 1980s, when his breakout TV role as Det. Hanson on Fox’s 21 Jump Street thrust him into the teen idol spotlight, he recoiled. The prospect of morphing into a heartthrob slowed his pulse. The thought of aspiring to be a chiseled face on a Sunset Boulevard billboard made him scowl.

So before the 1990 release of Edward Scissorhands, in which he played the quirky lead role in what would prove to be habit-forming, Depp swallowed a promise pill. He vowed to go it alone. He would pick parts based on artistic fulfilment, not commercial viability. The shy rebel would find peace by hiding behind oddball characters on the big screen. He would gravitate toward kindred spirits in the real world who exhaled the same antipathy toward Hollywood’s money-first ethos.

But a strange thing happened over the next 25 years: while taking an active disinterest in fame, Johnny Depp became one of the most famous actors in the world. While claiming an affinity with those in the creative margins, he became superrich. And he now finds himself in the crosshairs of that same money-first ethos. The lone wolf is getting eaten alive inside the penned industry that made him exactly what he vowed never to become, which is a quote-unquote movie star.

Depp’s latest film, Mortdecai, opened this weekend and put up Death to Smoochy numbers. It earned a paltry $4.13 million (all figures U.S.). As the leading man, this was Depp’s fifth consecutive flop and worst wide-release opening since The Astronaut’s Wife in 1999.

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Anticipation of another bomb — the reviews for Mortdecai were not kind — touched off a wave of recent think pieces in which observers asked, “What happened to Johnny Depp?” They wondered if his career is “decaying,” if he can “pull out of his box office dive,” if he “should retire” and, somewhat harshly, if he’s become “Hollywood’s biggest joke?”

The astronomical success of The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — more than $3.7 billion worldwide — catapulted Depp into a different orbit.

Suddenly, he was no longer just a gifted actor able to elevate offbeat roles in films such as Benny & Joon, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Ed Wood. He was the guy who created Captain Jack Sparrow, the swashbuckling pirate infused with the half-soused DNA of Keith Richards.

The character would lead to his greatest financial triumphs.

In retrospect, it would also become the biggest threat to Depp’s artistic equilibrium.

While it put him in a position to command more obscene cash and even greater power to veto any second-guessing on future projects — including the dead-on-arrivals The Tourist (2010), The Rum Diary (2011), Dark Shadows (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013) and Transcendence (2014) — it also seems to have clouded his own grasp on why he became so beloved in the first place.

It’s a hideous word, but there was something “authentic” about a Johnny Depp performance before Captain Sparrow. From Don Juan DeMarco to Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Sleepy Hollow, Chocolat to Blow, it always felt like Depp was truly lost in a world of his making.

You could argue this is no longer true, that on some level Depp is willing to now pack a few Sparrow-like tics into his bag of tricks and then have a few drinks. This leads to a philosophical query, the kind Depp may have contemplated before he started daydreaming on a private island: is buying into the idea of being quirky for the sake of quirky not the same as selling out?

The tattooed Hollywood insurgent, who once trashed hotel rooms and ignored award galas, seems to have achieved his personal nirvana.

“First, I reached a point where I cared so much and was so diligent in terms of approaching the work,” Depp told Details in a cover story last year. “Then you get to where you care so f---ing much that it gets goddamn beleaguering, you know? But then a great thing happens. Suddenly you care enough to not give a f---, because not giving a f---, that’s the total liberation.”

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